Developing Strategy with Business Leaders

Hello M and A Friends. If you're looking to improve your in house training, we have corporate training plans provided through the M and A Science Academy. Give your team members access to the best in class courses, templates and networking opportunities in the industry. Our Academy was designed to lead practitioners with the how to of M and A practices. If you're interested in learning more about individual or team plans, go to mascience.com academy it's also a great way to show your support for M and A science. Again, that's mascience.com academy. Onto the interview I'm Kisan Patel and you're listening to M and A Science where we talk with deal professionals and learn valuable lessons from their experience. This podcast focuses on stories, strategies and what actually happened during M and A deals. Welcome to M and A Science where leading M and A practitioners share lessons learned from their experience. If you're interested in keeping up with the latest from M and a science, visit mascience.com subscribe to our free newsletter Every Monday we share highlights from our interviews and invitations to events as we build the greatest community of forward thinking M and A practitioners. Again, that's mascience. Com. I'm your host Kisam Patel, CEO and founder of M and A Science. Joining me today is Mike McDonnell, Director Strategy at Koch Engineered Solutions. Koch Engineered Solutions is a number of businesses across several different industries. I'll let Mike explain more about that. Koch Engineer Solutions is also part of Koch Industries, which is massive, over 120,000 employees, one of the largest privately held companies in the world. Today we're going to talk about developing strategy with business leaders. Mike, how's it going?

Doing well. How are you doing?

I'm doing well. I'm happy to be here on the spot. I get to learn some stuff from you.

Absolutely.

I think the fun background is how we actually met because a lot of our guests, we bombard them until they finally agreed to come on the podcast. But you were nice enough I I think way back when I was first starting to work on Deal Room as I want to build a better mousetrap for managing diligence. You're nice enough to give me feedback and talk about all these little things. Now it circles back where I get to flip it around and really learn some things from you on the bigger picture of running M and A deals.

It's been a lot of fun. It's been a long ride. I think I met you eight or nine years ago. Been interesting to see how you built your business and growing your brand.

Can we kick things off a little bit. About your background.

I've been in M and A in strategy for a better part of 20 years. I started in M and A in New York for PressWaterhouseCoopers and I've gone back and forth between that, between strategy and M and A. I did some consulting work. I worked on the buy side. I've been with Koch for about eight years, since the end of 2015. Coming up on my nine year anniversary and in Coke I've done some strategy work. I've done a lot of M and A. I ran a business for one of our electronics subsidiaries and I've been with Koch Engineered Solutions now for the past two years. Focused almost exclusively on strategy within our business.

Pretty well diverse experience. Sounds like we're going to learn a lot about strategy. We all know it starts with the corporate strategy. Are you accountable for that? Do you work with the CEO? Is it purely up to business leaders? How does that get formulated?

Individual business leaders, and it goes down to people like the product managers and such will develop their strategies. But what it really starts with is the vision for the business. And our leadership team develops that vision. We obviously provide input around that. One of the things that we will do is work with the business to try and understand and formulate, formulate a view of the world where we think the world might be headed. And a strategy is ultimately an outcrop of that. How do we compete and drive profit in that world? It sits with the business leader, right? I can sit here and I can draw a lot of pretty PowerPoints. But the reality is I'm not going to convince someone with the PowerPoint who's doing this day to day. My job really is to help the business and the business leaders think about their strategy and formulate it, challenge their thinking, push back on things which don't make sense, might make sense in their mind, bring that outside perspective, in essence to take their thoughts and really upgrade them and challenge them and drive the strategy process within the business. But it's the business leaders that own the product managers. If we work with them that have to own that strategy.

You flush it out basically with the.

Business unit leaders and we bring an outside perspective. So I'll give you an example. We're hearing a lot about green energy in the world today and Coke is in a lot of commodity businesses. And we set out to start thinking about how is green energy impacting the world. My team started challenging some of the status quo, some of the mental models we had in the business, things like solar energy is not a profitable business without government support. That was a long held mental model. When we started doing the analysis, it turns out that's no longer the case. And so we ended up acquiring a business recently based off of some of that analysis that build solar farms for utility customers. We developed that, we presented the case and our management team bought into it and it became their view. We didn't do that in isolation, by the way. We were working directly with them and keeping them apprised of everything we're doing. Other times we might look to enter a new market or look at a product line and try and understand what we're going to ultimately do with that. And we're working directly with the business, pulling their knowledge, trying to bring outside market knowledge to the table and trying to formulate a fully rounded, coherent thought process around whatever the question we're trying to answer.

Extra eyes and ears, that sits out of their business.

I'll give you an example of our John Zink business that they do process controls, combustion systems and stuff like that for petrochem and oil and gas and someone who's been working in that for 20, 30 years, they're going to have a very detailed knowledge of their equipment and what it does. They might not have the knowledge of, hey, what else is out there? What are some of the other things we're thinking about? You wouldn't expect them to. It's our job to come in and say, hey, let's think about this. And have you thought about that? What do you think about this? I work with a management team that is very open to that. And that's our culture at Koch is we're very open to those challenges and thinking about the different alternatives out there and thinking about what else could be there.

Challenge the thinking.

Mr. Koch, who's our CEO and one of our largest shareholders, he's developed our management philosophy and a key part of it is challenge and challenging our superiors. And I ask people who work for me to challenge me and you can have the smartest guy in the room, he's gonna be no match for 20 people working together. So that's the general philosophy of it.

I like that philosophy a lot. I'm going to have to dig into that more. When you get the strategy shaping, how do you socialize that with corporate development?

We're part of the corporate development team. I focus mostly on strategy and point of view, what we call point of view, which is thinking about the world. But my team, the team that reports to me, does about half their time on M and A and half their time on strategy point of view. My colleagues are on the M and A side. My boss does both and so we're interlinked. The strategy is a key part of it. I'm with KAS Cook Engineered Solutions. All of our businesses have a similar type of structure for their corporate development teams because the two go hand in hand. Can't go spend a billion dollars buying another business without having some sort of underlying strategy on how you go about driving value from that deal. And that's where the strategy comes in and it overlaps. Even though I'm not out there negotiating my current role, I'm not out there negotiating deals. We're working with the team presenting to Mr. Kohler on whether we want to go ahead and spend his money. We're ingrained with that team and I think that works well. I've seen other corporate strategy practices which are siloed and I scratch my head a little bit. I don't understand how that works. Especially if you're trying to acquire and be acquisitive. Because M and A is an outcrop of strategy. It's one of the levers you can pull to drive value in your business.

How many people in strategy does it take to get that there? Because I get abused by some larger corporations that have quite a few people sitting in a strategy group and always just been curious about that. Have you found that in terms of number of people, size or anything correlated when you think about people dedicated to.

Strategy, if you think about a deal and you can either buy a new platform or you can do some sort of a bolt on, you're going to need a lot of help from the existing business. Either way, from the M and A side, it's a handful of people. And the strategy side, again, I mean if you're challenging the business to drive value and it's their strategy, still need only a handful of people. So it's probably one, one, maybe a little bit more on the strategy side depending on how complex the business is. In our group it's about 50, maybe a little bit more on the strategy point of view side. One of our businesses, MOLEX, they've got 40,000 employees and their strategy corporate development team is 14, 15 something in that range. They're stretched then sure, you can always have more, but it doesn't take a very large army in my opinion.

Then you got folks that wear the dual hat. Strategy and corp Dev, when we are.

Stretched, there are firms out there. You've heard of McKinsey and Bain and BCG. We can leverage.

Never heard of them.

Never heard of them. We leverage consultants when we need to. That's what they're there for. They're there to scale up when you need to.

Cool. How do you come up with the M and A strategy?

The strategy is all about driving profit. It's the way you're planning on trying to grow your profit. And there's two ways to do that. You can cut your costs or grow your top line, grow your business. And M and A is one of those levers you can pull. And if you're Starbucks or Coca Cola or someone like that, you're not going to go out and go buy an oil and gas business. There's got to be a reason for that. For me, it's around capabilities. If you have an existing business, you have a core set of capabilities. And when you say, look, we want to move into this new area, I'm going to pick on Coca Cola here for a second. I know nothing about them, so I apologize to them. But, you know, they might say, hey, you know what? We sell Coke. We sell Diet Coke. The world is moving into Kombucha or something, right? A new type of beverage. They might say, look, that's where we're going to go. What are we good at? We're really good at bottling. We're good at marketing on a mass SC scale. What does it take to be in Kombucha? These are smaller brands. There's more word of mouth. Might be in glass bottles. It's a fermentation process and such. These are things that we don't have a capability. We can either go try and build that capability ourselves or we can go buy it. It's probably a combination of both. And we're the same way. In my opinion, that is probably one of the better ways to think about M and A is you're acquiring certain set of capabilities that you can drive value that can help you get into a new market. It can help you get into a new product line. A new technology can bring talent in that you didn't have before. When I think about a strategy process and I think about taking a business in a certain direction, it's missing certain capabilities because if it had those capabilities, it would already be in that position that you wanted to take it to. And so that's what you're trying to solve for. How do we close the gap on capabilities we need to succeed?

Okay, what about stuff maybe outside of capabilities? I'm thinking of we work with rollups and they're consolidating a market, do you think of that as capabilities in a.

Different way or for some reason? It's coming to my head. If you take like a distributor business and so these are local businesses that are buying product, holding it and selling it to smaller customers, you might say, hey, we have Mid Atlantic, we've got the Southeast, we've got the South. But hey, I don't really have anything in the Pacific Northwest. So I have a choice. I can either build it or I can try and buy it. That's a pretty common question you ask in M and A is build versus buy. And what's the trade off there? I kind of view that as the same way you're bringing in how something that you don't have.

Okay, that makes sense.

In that case, you're entering a new market, you're buying essentially a customer base.

All right, so going back to strategy, you start with driving profits that you can either cut costs, grow revenue, and that lends to the discovery of capabilities. And then it's M and A as a tool against that to how do you execute on achieving that capabilities? What I'm trying to get is a little step by step here because those are always the fun ones. When I get Mike's framework for developing a strategy.

Let's start at the top, right? So let's take Coca Cola for a second. And so Coca Cola says, okay, what is going to happen to beverages over the next 20? And they're going to put in and say, look, there's going to be dietary issues that come up. You have all these consumers in India and Africa and China who are making more money. They're going to want to stop drinking water and drink Western drink. And so they come up with this view of the world. They'll say, hey, look, now we have this view. What is our vision? What do we want to be in this world? We want to sell Coca Cola to everyone in the world, or we want to be the world's premier beverage company, or we want to be something along those lines. And that's where their vision comes in. And again, this is all iterative process. And so say, they say they want to be the premier beverage company in the world and not necessarily the best. The Coca Cola being the number one beverage. They want to be a company which has collection of beverages to be the world's leader in beverages. That might be their vision. So then they start to say, okay, for us to do that. Let's understand where we are today. So we're the number one seller of sugar based sodas and diet sodas. We have these gaps in these other areas. So let's start thinking about how do we go and fill those gaps. So we can launch a kombucha line or we can go do something else, or we can go try and buy someone. Maybe we go buy the local kombucha brewery, maybe we go buy a water company. I think Coca Cola owns the Sami and go down that pathway. So that's where sort of that strategy comes in. It starts with, in my mind, the view of the world. And that's a well informed view of the world. It's not just a whiteboard session. There's a lot of thought that goes behind that. And then the question is, how do we want to win in that world? How do we want to win in that environment? And from there that starts to ask the question, what is it going to take to win in that world and what are we missing? And now you can start to see your strategy starts to come out of it. It takes these three things to win in this world. And I have one of them. I got to go get the other two. It's going to take going to acquire or build those.

Okay, I want to make sure I got this right. This is Mike McDonald's framework on strategy here. Number one is the view of the world. I think the where we want to be is part of that vision.

It's defining how we want to win in that problem.

Or is that a separate step?

I have a personal pet peeve. I hear very often, hey, I want to play, we want to play. And I correct people and says, no, if you want to play somewhere, then you go on a soccer field. You want to win in this because winning is very different than playing in a market.

I like that. That's all together. The vision, the worldview. This is where we see things going and then where we want to be. It's really a different thinking there because you develop the worldview, then you really start thinking your organization, where do you want to be? Then you get how do we win? Which I guess the next is what does it take? Which is when. That's how do you fill in the gaps, what does it take? And then how to actually do it. That's probably when you start identifying companies and things like that.

Absolutely. And look, it goes both ways. You might be in an environment that's in decline. So using Coca Cola again and they say, hey, people aren't buying as many sugary drinks for dietary reasons. That's the world we're looking at. And so how do we win that world? We want to be the last man standing. We need to be as lean as possible, as efficient as possible. You see that in commodity markets, we want to be the low cost provider because we want to be the last one standing. And that's where the cost cutting side of things comes in. And obviously they're not mutually exclusive. You do both and then that whole.

Shaping gets to sort of those steps that we described where you really figure it out. This is what we're trying to do and what specific things that we needed to get there. With this strategy. How do you ensure that you have alignment with business unit leaders? It's interesting too, because I think you're working across quite a few different business unit leaders. So what does that look like? Is there a process around it?

Yeah, Kes, where we are is a collection of 10 different businesses and some fairly small, some very big. Each business leader is very different. They come at things differently, they think differently, and that's great. They've all been successful in their own certain ways. Number one is you have to gain their trust. You're there to help them drive their strategy, help them drive their business. You got to work with them. Like I said, I'm never going to go deliver them a PowerPoint and say, here you go, this is what you got to do. It's sitting down with them and challenging them and taking their input and understanding their business.

So ultimately they own the strategy.

Yes.

You don't show up at the PowerPoint saying, hey, here's an update on the strategy that we changed for you today.

No. Yeah, exactly. And look, I'll take them through the framework. It's like I had one of the CEOs and I said to him, look, I'm going to take you through a strategy process. It's going to be painful and arduous. And he kind of rolled his eyes and said, sure, we'll go through it. And we. Because my boss is telling me to go through it. In the end, they shaped their vision based off the work we did. And I say we. It's really me and that business in particular. They've structured their business based around that and they're out there pounding the pavement, executing on it and sharing that vision with our leadership and our leadership's leadership and all the way up the chain. But I didn't come up with anything. All I did was try and pull as much external information to challenge their thinking, get them to really think outside the box and challenge their own business model, challenge their own legacy thinking and in this case, this team is pretty good at that kind of stuff. They're pretty open about that. But sometimes you'll get a team that's closed off and it takes a lot more work, takes a lot more time and you need buy in from everyone.

What's that strategy exercise like? How do I do it? Here at M and A Science, I.

Use workshops a lot, bring everyone together and what I've done in the past is I'll sometimes give them a case study and more like just a team building exercise, a paper exercise to make them think a little bit, but also make them a little bit more vulnerable. There's one in particular I use that has a twist in the end that people have gotten upset at me about. Frankly, when you hear about it, it's interesting. You can find it online, it's called Carter Racing. And it's a question of do you race or not? And they give you a little bit of data and there's a lot of financial information and it comes down to, it's sort of a coin flip whether you do it or not. The teams that do it correctly ask for more information, but no one's ever asked me for more information information since doing it. But if you read, it's developed by Northwestern University and no one ever asked for more information, according to them. But the data turns out it's from NASA and it's the Challenger accident. And most people say, hey, we want to race, we want to fly. When I did it, I was pretty stunned. We literally sent seven astronauts to die here. It disarms people a little bit. And then we start getting into, let's talk about your business, let's talk about what you're good at, let's talk about what you're not good at, let's talk about the world. Where is the world headed to? What do you think is most important? How can we answer certain questions? Let's go answer those questions. So you start to kind of build off of that. And with the team, working directly with the team, it's not a day process. It takes time, takes multiple meetings, it takes multiple sessions. You leave, you get gathered more information, you bring it back and it's iterative and frankly, no two processes are the same. You want to cater it to the business, cater to their personalities and cater it to what they're ultimately asking for.

Quite the icebreaker there.

It's funny, I had one person and most people will get over it pretty quickly and realize what it is, what it is, but I had one person who got very upset and actually post the meeting called me up and said it was a very unfair case study to do. And I said, it's not meant to be fair. It's designed to be provocative. And that's the point. And I'd use a different one if I found it to be as effective. That one works well.

Good stuff. Maybe that could be another podcast. You can workshop a whole strategy session. And what are the biggest challenges when implementing the strategy?

It's the personalities in the room and the mental models people bring to the table. Hands down, everyone has biased biases. It's trying to break down those biases and getting people to understand them. And the nice thing at Koch is we focus a lot in on that. Most people at Koch recognize that they have certain biases, and that's just the way the human mind works. There's too many variables, too much information out there. So our mind develops these mental models and these biases to try and cope with all the information that's out there. It works well for the most part. I did a deal once. It didn't go through, but company was looking to buy one of their competitors and we're looking at synergies and all the information was public and the competitor was producing at, I think it was like 15 to 20% below what my client was producing at in terms of their cost to produce. We presented, hey, here's a synergy. If we adopt their manufacturing processes, we can lower our costs by X. And our management team just. They could not get around the fact that their competitor was lower cost than they said, no, there's no way they're lower cost. There's no way there's lower cost. These guys are not as smart as us. There's no, you know, that was a mental model that, you know, hey, we're the best management team out there and you do see that one quite a bit. And we just got to break through it. And ultimately the deal never went through, partially because they couldn't justify the valuation because they didn't use that potential synergy. Now, I could be wrong. There could be something in there that our management team just didn't explain to us. But you get mental models around certain markets. I mentioned solar market. Coke had a mental model previously. It was uneconomic without subsidies. And they don't necessarily want to get into a market where subsidies drive value. But when we challenge them, and the nice part is our management team is open to those challenges and they're humble enough to say things have changed and our mental model no longer holds. Ultimately, is challenging those mental models and those biases which really do become the biggest challenge.

I think there's two things. There is bias and then there's uncertainty in general because you build a model with all your predictive synergies and how do you get that confidence level in achieving those things? It's almost like a mix between the two. I don't know if you look at that or you look at as one in the same.

If you're always challenging those mental models, you can get to paralysis by analysis. So at some point you've got to move on. You've got to convince yourself that, hey, the 95% that I know or the 85% that I know is enough to move forward with this.

You got somebody that's, that's not buying into the model. How would you decipher if there's a bias there? Given that the manufacturer, there's no way they're going to beat us on margins. Or if it's more of an uncertainty that I don't think that's going to happen, or I don't think you're going to capture that cost energy you're anticipating.

Yeah, there's always uncertainty in everything. And this is something I have on the MA side we talk about. There's uncertainty in every deal. And you need to understand that individuals have a better willing to accept different levels of uncertainty and different levels of risk. I think when you go into a deal, at the very least you should understand most of the risks, most of the key risks that can really impact value. So that cost synergy around that, hey, we know the culture over there, for example, and we may not be able to adopt it, or our management team may not be able to, or our team might not be able to adopt their methods or whatever. For manufacturing, that's a risk. Culture is obviously key. Risk and uncertainty in terms of biases, I think those present differently.

Okay.

I find biases tend to present more as a certainty. No one ever makes money in this region. That's a mental model with a certain certainty around it, which I would challenge. But coming around and saying, look, I'm not sure if we can break into this market is more of an uncertainty. So I think it's presents differently.

I get it now. That helps when you explain it that way. On the biases. How do you deal with that?

You got to have the right people in the room. There's no doubt about it.

Like a shrink, a therapist or something.

Psychiatric pouch in the back and analyze someone. But the nice part about where I work we challenge each other and we're there to challenge and we're open to that. I'm open to someone saying, hey, I think you might be thinking about this incorrectly. And that could be my own mental model and my own biases. That's part of it. But if you have people in there who just are unwilling to accept challenge, then it's gonna be very hard to break through. I've dealt with people like that. And sometimes you ask questions. I don't know if you ever heard of the five whys. The five whys is actually a really good way to get to someone starting to question it. But ultimately the person themselves has to recognize that they have this bias. I'm not gonna say, hey, look, I think you're biased here. If they're not open to that, then they're just dismissive. I made so many mistakes trying to get people to recognize biases and just doing it the wrong way. And the best way to do it is just to ask questions and try and ask not quite meeting questions, but questions that kind of get to the root of. Because in the end that person might be correct. They've developed that mental model, that bias based on their experience. And it could be me that's incorrect.

So it sounds like when trying to unearth the biases or handle it, but underpinning it is this state of open minded versus closed minded that you got.

To deal with 100%. And there's varying degrees of it.

Yeah, it sounds like a element that you want to demonstrate you're open minded first by listening to the other person and get a sense of where their positioning comes from. I guess it's kind of like back and forth. Right. Here's some of this information and see how receptive they are versus not receptive. But this is fun stuff. This is a lot of stuff. I talk, I do a podcast with my daughter. She did a few M and A science stuff. Now she's graduated. But I do one where it's basically teaching kids leadership lessons. Anybody listening wants to check it out. It's called boss move. Just one word. But a lot of it comes back to this where it's like fundamental leadership lessons. Open minded versus closed minded. How do you deal with closed minded people? Part of it's can you empathize with them? Can you connect with them to get a sense of why they think the way they do first? And then it, it allows you to get that recosity to encourage them to want to hear you out and learn your perspective versus just, just defending opposing views. Till death.

You're 100% correct. I find that there's no one is 100% closed off. And frankly if they are, they're probably not very much fun to hang out with. People are always willing to rethink something else. It might not be worth your time to break through that. It might be a lost cause. But most people are fairly open minded in the sense that if presented with opposing information, they'll either try and justify their existing position or rethink a little bit. And getting back to it is trying to break through and make people somewhat vulnerable in those strategies. Get them to rethink things a little bit to challenge their own biases, their own mental thought processes.

What if you got a BU leader that's just crazy, like they're seriously out of their mind and you've reached that conclusion. Do you have any recourse in the corp dev group? Can you. Do you just. Do you bring it up to the C suite like say, hey, I think Joe's lost his marbles here.

Not so much lost their marbles, but I've had in the past first of every strategy session I do, RC Suite knows about it, they're aware of it, and we're not siloed or anything. And they want to understand progress and such. If we can't get through to a management team, then, you know, there's nothing I can really do about it. We'll let the C suite know and say, hey, we need to take a different path. I don't give up easily and I'll try and find different alternatives. Maybe it's me personally, maybe I rubbed them the wrong way. You're sitting in New York and I went spent a lot of time in New York and I went to college there. So I have a bit of a New Yorker person personality and that doesn't go well with some people. So it could be me and maybe I'll send in one of my team members and maybe you can break through a little bit better. And maybe my approach isn't wrong or maybe I have the wrong opinion here and maybe these guys are actually correct. There could be a lot of reasons that someone is nuts. In the end, they could still be correct.

Absolutely true. I think of you as more of a hybrid, by the way, like maybe half New York, half Midwest.

I've toned down a little bit of living in Chicago the last eight years. Funny, I go back to New York now and I'm not sure I can handle it.

I like it. The rumor going around M and A science may put Our headquarters, studios out here.

A lot of activity out there.

In terms of strategy, where do you stop with strategy? Do you go on into the deal itself? What should be the right approach there?

We'll go past the deal, right? Because when you develop a strategy and you say, look, we need this, we need to go get this, if this is a new market or it's a capability or it's a product or whatever, you have a reason for buying that business, which is some of the best that you're taking to acquire it. But once you acquire it, you actually got to go execute and you have this business that's sitting out there. That business is people and they're now part of a large organization. We tend to be involved quite a bit post the deal. When I do the M and A side of it, I tend to get to 60 days post deal and kind of hand it off to the integration teams and such. But the strategy tends to go past that and tends to be quite involved in trying to help execute on those bets. Trying to help execute on the synergies that we're doing. Developed, helping the business set their own strategy. I've seen this before where you acquire a business and you have certain notions about that business. You go in and they say, hey, your thought process is wrong here for these reasons. And then you have to go back and you have to rethink your strategy. And it might not be a lost cause, but hey, it throws a wrench into the mix. There's something fundamentally different about that business or that industry that you're entering that you missed.

It's like you want to keep the thinking around strategy to stay intact and not go sideways.

I think it's Disney that does this. You can actually look online and find their vision statements and they constantly change it because the world around them is changing. I tend to view an organization that creates a vision, creates a strategy and doesn't deviate or doesn't tweak it or doesn't make improvements to it as being short sighted. If you're constantly changing, you're switching 180. That's a problem, obviously. But as you're going down your pathways, you're learning more. You should be impacting what you're doing as you learn more. That should inform your decisions and your strategy and your vision as you move forward in the pathway you're taking.

How do you iterate on that? It's almost like that's a broader thing. Is your strategy, how often do you change it, assess it? Are there certain trigger points or things that prompt you to do so.

I mean you gotta be open minded and you have to look at information that comes across your desk and say, hey wait a minute, we recognize this. This is a fundamentally different thing here. This is changing our viewpoint. I've seen companies make large acquisitions based on a certain viewpoint and a disruptive technology comes out and we missed it, we have to change course. That's where that humility comes in. And having to constantly look over your shoulder and be paranoid if you will and try and learn more. If you're completely closed minded and you stick to your guns no matter what, then you're going to find yourself in trouble. I don't think there's any set criteria, hey, you should look at, relook at it every 18 months. But depending on the business, maybe you look at it it much quicker. Maybe if you wait it out a little bit longer and ask yourself what's changed every two years or something. There's no real set timeframe in my mind. I think it's just a business.

It sounds like there's things that bubble up in the conversation that would prompt you for things like that, a big news announcement or something. You got any interesting stories where you screwed up strategy?

I'll give you a really good one. Actually, way back in the day I was working with a company that developed a technology to extract uranium very cheaply and so said, hey, let's go buy some uranium assets. One of the risks that came out of that was uranium. Because of green energy, the demand for uranium is going through the roof. But if something happens, something blows up somewhere, then this can go south. And ultimately that's what happened. Right. So Fukushima happened, I think six months after this company started acquiring assets and the uranium prices fell to the floor. Germany started shutting down their nuclear power plants, China stopped building them. And it's a risk we identified. But it's one of those things that hey, it happened.

I don't know if you like screwed up the strategy. I feel like that was like mother nature just gibbage that thing.

Mother nature had some fun that day. I screwed up around just the process and trying to get people to think differently. I had one group that they said, hey, we develop a part for cars and we don't know what our market share is. And I said, all right, hang on. I went down to my rental car and I took photographs underneath the hood of all the parts and I said, you can count them up and you can see, hey, this one's your competitor and this one is this. And challenge them that way. And boy did I read the room wrong. That did not go over very well and that was a lesson learned on my part in terms of how to get people to try and change their mind and challenge those biases. There's a lot of lessons here and there. You learn things in terms of, hey, we went down a pathway and you really screwed up because you're constantly iterating. I struggle to find one where I say, hey, we developed a strategy. Five years later we look back and it was a completely wrong pathway because if you're doing it right, you're challenging yourself and you might find a year down the path the road, hey, this is incorrect. We need to pivot. I have lots of pivots.

Sounds like one of the lessons learned was having that bottoms up approach as opposed to top down. I think even examples you provided earlier were very much around that design thinking. How do you pull those things up so people can put their stuff out there and get more of that collective thinking together? Hey Mike, thanks so much for taking the time. I learned a lot about strategy and enjoyed the conversation.

Yeah, look, this was great and I'm happy to help out in any way I can.

It's been a lot of fun. Here's to the deal.

Foreign.

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